Profits and Food

By John Burl Smith

An intriguing 2-part article by Ian Angus entitled Capitalism, Agribusiness and the Food Sovereignty Alternative (6/27/10) echoes the thesis of my first novel Archangel: A Hip Hop Vision of Love and the Battle of Good Versus Evil. During its writing in 2006, I envisioned the story line as a farfetched science fiction which now seems more like "art imitating life." Archangel’s plot emerges out of several back stories of people caught in the grip of a manufactured food crisis, much like the poor today, as underground heroes fight to save a starving world. Greedy corporations that are tampering with the world’s food supply conspire to reduce people to being only a source of profits. Angus is not as melodramatic in his presentation as Archangel, but he essentially makes the same point.

Angus begins by commending Venezuela and President Hugo Chavez, the first to respond to food riots in Haiti with 364 tons of badly needed food, for the proper action to such a humanitarian crisis. "The people of Haiti were suffering from the attacks of the empire’s global capitalism, which calls for genuine and profound solidarity from all of us."

Wagging his finger at other nations as hypocrites, Angus points out that though aid in such situations is necessary, it is only a stopgap. "To truly address the problem of world hunger, we must understand and then change the system that causes it. First, we must understand that there is no shortage of food in the world today. Study after study has shown that global food production has consistently outstripped population growth, and that there is more than enough food to feed everyone."

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), enough food is produced in the world to provide over 2800 calories a day to everyone -- substantially more than the minimum required for good health, and about 18% more calories per person than in the 1960s, despite a significant increase in total population. The Food First Institute points out, "abundance, not scarcity, best describes the supply of food in the world today." Yet, most proposed solutions to world hunger call for new technologies to increase food production.

The problem from Angus’ perspective is "Scientific research is vitally important to the development of agriculture, but initiatives that assume in advance that new seeds and chemicals are needed are neither credible nor truly scientific. The fact that there is already enough food to feed the world shows that the food crisis is not a technical problem -- it is a social and political problem. Rather than asking how to increase production, our first question should be why, when so much food is available, are over 850 million people hungry and malnourished and 18,000 children die of hunger every day?"

The answer is "The global food industry is not organized to feed the hungry; it is organized to generate profits for corporate agribusiness. This year, agribusiness profits are soaring above last year’s levels, while hungry people from Haiti to Egypt to Senegal are taking to the streets to protest rising food prices." These figures are from just the first three months of 2008. Grain Trading: Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) gross profit $1.15 billion, up 55% from 2007; Cargill net earnings $1.03 billion, up 86% and Bunge Consolidated gross profit $867 million, up 189%. Seeds & herbicides: Monsanto gross profit $2.23 billion up 54%, Dupont Agriculture and Nutrition pre-tax operating income $786 million up 21%. Fertilizer: Potash Corporation net income $66 million, up 185.9% and Mosaic net earnings $520.8 million, up more than 1,200%. This is beyond greed, obscene by any humanitarian standards.

Angus cuts to the heart of the food crisis with this observation, "These companies, plus a few more, are the monopoly or near-monopoly buyers and sellers of agricultural products around the world. Six companies control 85% of the world trade in grain; three control 83% of cocoa; three control 80% of the banana trade. ADM, Cargill and Bunge effectively control the world’s corn, which means that they alone decide how much of each year’s crop goes to make ethanol, sweeteners, animal feed or human food." The editors of Hungry for Profit supports this thesis, "The enormous power exerted by the largest agribusiness/food corporations allows them essentially to control the cost of their raw materials purchased from farmers while at the same time keeping prices of food to the general public at high enough levels to ensure large profits."

Over the past three decades, transnational agribusiness companies have engineered a massive restructuring of global agriculture. Directly through their own market power and indirectly through governments and the World Bank, IMF and World Trade Organization, they have changed the way food is grown and distributed around the world, making food crises a part of the profit motive. Consequently, the world is not experiencing a food crisis rather it has a farm crisis that has been building for decades.

During this period, the rich countries of the north have forced poor countries to open their markets, and then flooded those markets with subsidized food, devastating Third World farming. Conversely, southern countries were cajoled and bullied into adopting agricultural policies that promote export crops rather than food for domestic consumption. Large-scale industrial agriculture produces single-crop (monoculture) that demands massive amounts of water and huge quantities of fertilizer and pesticides. Increasingly, traditional farming has been pushed aside for industrial farming for agribusinesses.

Angus cites India as a prime example of a country that exports food while millions of people are starving. Over 1/5 of India’s population is chronically hungry and 48% of children under age 5 are malnourished. Nevertheless, India exported $1.5 billion worth of milled rice and $322 million worth of wheat in 2004. Colombia’s farmland which used to grow food for domestic consumption now grows, produces and exports 62% of all cut flowers sold in the United States, while 13% of the population is malnourished. Kenya was self-sufficient in food until about 25 years ago. Now it imports 80% of its food but exports 80% of its agricultural products. Such cases would be laughable were they not so tragic.

Contrary to the claims of agribusiness, the latest agricultural research, including more than a decade of concrete experience in Cuba, proves that small and mid-sized farms using sustainable agroecological methods are much more productive and vastly less damaging to the environment than huge industrial farms. Industrial farming continues not because it is more productive, but because it has been able, until now, to deliver uniform products in predictable quantities, bred specifically to resist damage during shipment to distant markets. That’s where the profit is, and profit is what counts, no matter what the effect may be on earth, air, and water.

Fighting for food sovereignty took a giant step forward when La Via Campesina (Peasant Way) was organized in 1995. An umbrella body that encompasses more than 120 small farmers’ and peasants’ organizations in 56 countries, ranging from the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil to the National Farmers Union in Canada, La Via Campesina pursues food sovereignty as an alternative to food security. They argued: what’s needed is access to land, water, and resources, and the people affected must have the right to know and to decide about food policies. Food is too important to be left to the global market and the manipulations of agribusiness: world hunger can only be ended by re-establishing small and mid-sized family farms as the key elements of food production.

To read Angus’ two-part article, go to http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=2539 and to get information about Archangel: A Hip Hop Vision of Love and the Battle of Good Versus Evil go to www.Archangelworld.com to get the book.

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